I'm a San Francisco Bay Area-based independent journalist specializing in energy and the environment, with a focus on energy and climate policy. My work has appeared at Yale Environment 360, the Guardian, MotherJones.com, Smithsonian.com, GreenBiz.com, Chinadialogue, and the Christian Science Monitor, among others. I've reported from France, Germany, Switzerland, and Denmark. For the 14 months leading up to COP15, I reported from Copenhagen for Monday Morning and the Copenhagen Climate Council. Follow me on Twitter at @JustinGerdes and Circle me at Google+. Send comments or pitches to: justingerdes [at] gmail.com

Why The U.S. Needs A National Climate And Energy Plan

I wrote yesterday about a bill recently introduced by a freshman state lawmaker that would require policymakers to plan for how California will reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 80% by 2050. The prudent proposal reminds lawmakers that California’s forward-thinking climate policy, which includes a declining cap on GHG emissions and, most importantly, a price on carbon, must be extended beyond 2020, when the state’s climate change law, AB32, expires.

California’s suite of complementary policies – including a cap-and-trade system, renewable portfolio standard, building and vehicle energy efficiency standards, and low-carbon fuel standard – provide investors, industry, and policymakers with certainty through 2020. A remarkable piece of reporting published this week by Bloomberg BNA correspondent Paul Shukovsky is a case study of the need for such certainty at the national level.

Shukovsky’s deeply reported story describes months-long deliberations between the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (Corps), the Environmental Protection Agency (*EPA), the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), and the states of Oregon and Washington over how to account for the climate change impact of three coal-export terminals proposed for the West Coast.

Navigating the inter-agency dispute requires venturing into the arcane world of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). Basically, anytime a proposed action would take place on federal land, receive federal money, or fall under the jurisdiction of a federal agency, the responsible agency (often the BLM, Forest Service, or Fish and Wildlife Service) is required, under NEPA, to analyze the project’s environmental impact.

Into this relatively straightforward process – preparation of an environmental impact statement, identification of environmental impacts and possible mitigation measures, and a decision to approve or reject the project – a new obligation has recently been introduced: climate change. In the absence of a national climate and energy plan, how should agencies assess the planet-warming potential of individual projects?

That theoretical question has found a real-world example in the scoping process for the Corps’ environmental impact statement for the Gateway Pacific Terminal, a coal export facility proposed for a site on Puget Sound, close to the border with Canada. “At issue,” writes Shukovsky, “is how broadly the government should extend its analysis: whether to consider the impacts of each of the Pacific Northwest export terminals through narrowly tailored individual environmental impact statements or to assess their cumulative effects together, which would allow for a comprehensive analysis of possible climate change impacts.”

The Corps wants to draft a conventional project-specific environmental impact statement that assesses the Gateway Pacific Terminal in isolation; environmental advocates, the EPA, and the states of Oregon and Washington, meanwhile, want the Corps to draft a programmatic environmental impact statement that analyzes the cumulative impact of all three proposed coal-export terminals.

For now, CEQ, the referee in such matters, is not tipping its hand – CEQ responded to Shukovsky’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for information on its NEPA climate change guidance to federal agencies by sending heavily redacted e-mails.

Inter-agency debates over how to address and account for the climate change impacts of major projects signals the need for a national climate plan. Credit: Official White House Photo by Chuck Kennedy

Ray Clark, CEQ’s deputy director for NEPA oversight during the Clinton administration, told Shukovsky that the Corps is not keen to evaluate the climate change impact of burning U.S. coal in Asia. “Why should the corps be saddled with all the baggage of making such a huge decision?” he asked. “It’s not really a corps decision. This is a bigger thing than the Corps of Engineers. It’s got a lot of implications. For example, why would you permit mining Powder River Basin coal [from federal land] with no place for it to go? There are a lot of decisions here. Why is the corps being asked to make these big macro decisions?” [my emphasis]

These are all valid points and get at what is, I think, the real takeaway from Shukovsky’s story: the United States must address how it will assess and account for the climate change impact, in and outside its borders, of major projects such as the construction of coal-export terminals and the Keystone XL pipeline and the below market price sale of coal from Wyoming’s Powder River Basin.

Guidance from the White House?

CEQ usually defers to the regulatory agency conducting the NEPA review, but, to account for climate change impacts, that might have to change. “The president could ask CEQ to require the cumulative analysis of the effect of a whole variety of projects on greenhouse gases worldwide,” Columbia University Law Professor Michael B. Gerrard told Shukovsky.

But for that to be a real alternative, or until political changes permit passage of climate change legislation in Congress, courts must settle whether federal agencies are permitted to account for overseas emissions in an environmental impact statement and the White House needs to release guidance for agencies. On the former point, Gerrard said: “It’s very much an open question. And there is a great deal of variations among agencies in how they consider climate change under NEPA.”

In February 2010, CEQ Chairwoman Nancy Sutley issued draft guidance [PDF] on climate change for federal agencies, but it has not been implemented. Asked why the guidance had not been finalized, a CEQ spokesperson told Shukovsky that the office is“working to incorporate the extensive public comment we received on our draft NEPA guidance, and will release updated guidance when it is completed.”

Bloomberg BNA reported this morning that at a Center for Strategic and International Studies event convened yesterday Heather Zichal, deputy assistant to the president for energy and climate change, said that “President Obama will announce in the upcoming weeks and months decisive actions the administration is planning to combat climate change.”

*Disclosure: My brother is a NEPA Specialist in the Environmental Review Office for EPA Region 9 in San Francisco. He participated in drafting the region’s response to the CEQ solicitation of input for NEPA climate change guidance.

Post Your Comment

Post Your Reply

Forbes writers have the ability to call out member comments they find particularly interesting. Called-out comments are highlighted across the Forbes network. You'll be notified if your comment is called out.

Comments

We are looking at anthropogenic climate change through the eye of a needle: the span of industry when our science of measuring the change was able. In that span warming seems disastrous.

Some 10,000 years ago Earth migrated closer to the sun giving us the Holocene epoch and all of written history. Earth has passed its closest approach to the sun for a while, and since then insolation diminishes. This is seen in the data as a “but for” man’s intervention we would have cooling.

The problem is that humans have limited resources to cause warming. Eventually Earth’s orbital dynamics – perhaps 4,000 years hence – will overwhelm our ability to keep the planet warm. At that time the glaciers will march again, sweeping our cities into the seas. It doesn’t matter if we burn every peat bog, oil reservoir and frack every natural gas reservoir. It doesn’t matter if we dredge the arctic subsea for clathrates. The graph we see is like an elecron micrograph of the point of a needle: it looks fairly flat, but slopes down hard on either side. Eventually the sun wins, and that is it for mankind. At that point we kill each other over diminishing resources until our culture and science are lost.

The end is near. Less than 4,000 years hence. We need to start thinking about what we’re going to do about that. We need to start thinking about what we’re going to do when – not if – the glaciers come back.

The global warming thing is a minor distraction. If the Earth warmed as much as they say, we’d wear shorts more often in summer. That’s a whole other level of issue.